Manolín, The Doctor of Salsa, lashed out harshly against Mariela Castro in an interview with Tania Costa for CiberCuba, where he pointed out the central contradiction of the Cuban regime: promoting sexual diversity while absolutely repressing freedom of thought.
"It's crazy. I think there's even a mental delay there too," said the singer, before launching into the phrase that sums up his argument: Fidel and Raúl, through Mariela, "acknowledge sexual diversity. In other words, their freedom from the waist down."
Manolín left no room for ambiguity: "How can one conclude that sexuality is diverse but not arrive at the conclusion that thought is diverse? How can anyone come to such a conclusion? Because they are shameless. Because they do what suits them."
The singer repeated the same expression three times to qualify that contradiction: "What shamelessness! What shamelessness! What shamelessness!"
Manolín made it clear that, in his view, Mariela does not act independently: "The Castros are the ones who decide everything we do." Raúl Castro's daughter has been leading the National Center for Sexual Education since 2000 and has been the public figure behind advancements such as the Family Code, which was approved in a referendum in September 2022 with 66.87% of the votes.
However, these advancements have been widely challenged as contradictory. In May 2019, CENESEX itself canceled the official Conga against Homophobia and an independent alternative march was repressed by plainclothes agents with forced detentions.
For Manolín, contradiction is not a logical error but a calculated decision: the regime allows what benefits it and suppresses what threatens it.
The singer expanded his criticism to the geopolitical level, accusing the regime of having "blown up all of Latin America," harboring guerrillas and fugitives wanted by the United States, and aligning itself with China and Russia. "You are in my backyard and are setting up a platform for them to catch me. These people are crazy," he stated.
Manolín compared the situation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: just as Putin would not tolerate Ukraine approaching the European Union, the United States would have similar reasons to not allow Cuba to serve as a base for its adversaries. "They haven't wiped us out by miracle. We haven't been wiped off the face of the earth purely by miracle, because the dictatorship has served us on a silver platter. It has been serving us on a silver platter for years," he stated.
The singer also emphasized that the Cuban people have always been left out of the decisions made by those in power: “All the decisions made in Cuba, whether political, social, or economic, in the last 70 years have been made by the Cuban government without our input. We are just left to deal with the fallout.”
This interview takes place weeks after Manolín intensified his public criticisms of the regime. In April, and urged the people to "not save their executioners," and just days earlier he had warned that in response to a call from Díaz-Canel.
"The blackouts, the misery, the hunger, the scarcity of everything, we pay for it. They take the measures because they have it all," concluded Manolín, summarizing in a single sentence the logic that, in his view, defines 70 years of dictatorship in Cuba.
Filed under: